One early Thanksgiving morning I was awakened by an ear-shattering metallic crashing sound.
I was twelve years old.
Until the sound, I had been deeply asleep.
Having been rudely awakened, I went downstairs.
I went to the kitchen.
My mother was gathering up random pieces of what had not long previous been a very large cast iron frying pan.
She had snapped: her husband and her son were sound asleep on Thanksgiving morning while she was in the kitchen chopping vast quantities of onion, celery and garlic to be sauteed in a fry pan, to be included in the stuffing, so her husband and her son, once awake and present in their gender favored roles of “Gee, that looks good” could validate the pre-dawn work of the “little woman”.
My mother had had a flash of unacceptance, and the fry pan was much the worse for wear.
She had hurled it to the floor with frenzy.
There was a thin veneer of oily chopped onion, celery and garlic evenly spread across the kitchen floor as witness to the fact that the pan, not long previous had had a mission.
That mission being no longer viable.
The tradition immediately became: every Thanksgiving we meet in some kitchen somewhere, with mimosas, and bring out the cast iron shards, carted hither and yon over the years, and the miles, and decide whether to sacrifice its replacement similarly.
To date we haven’t.
Sacrificed its replacement.
It’s an old pan now.
And then, as part of this traditional ceremony, we move on and back to that same morning, so long ago, and remember lovingly the cocoa divinity cake that had been thrown into the sink, not long after the fry pan had become shards on the floor, that cake having been, subsequent to its impact in the sink and its having been separated by that impact into several asymmetric components, pasted together into a cake-like silhouette with its frosting: “best cocoa divinity cake I ever had” we had all said.
And none of us ever had liked cocoa divinity cakes.
And we had always wondered why my mother had always made them.
Never have had an answer.
And then we muse about whether the fact that the turkey had been treated in a manner similar, just after the cake had been transformed in the sink.
Wasn’t that “the tenderest, juiciest turkey ever”?
Side fact always discussed: that turkey just fit the sink.
(My mother had had a really accurate eye for the arc between top of her head and bottom of sink; she had nailed it; dead center; that fact always conjures images of giants throwing boulders off cliffs and we end up talking about Kirk Douglas).
We never answer that question - juiciest? - but refer it to “next year”.
And then we make another mimosa.
That being the Prime Holiday Tradition.
